When reading a scene, often the details give the narrative an immediacy that helps us connect and visualize the story as it’s unfolding for us. However, when writing memoir, you are often relying on something that is famously fallible and incomplete: your human memory. This makes including details in a memoir a somewhat more complex task than it does in fictional narrative or topical non-fiction work. Authors we work with often fret over the details they can’t remember or fill in completely. Part of this fear is because while you’re forming a narrative, especially if your goal is for your memoir to “read like fiction,” it is in fact non-fiction, and you are sharing a true story, so there is an internalized pressure to be fully accurate, or worse, exact. No honest personal story ever told could possibly relate 100% of the details with perfect accuracy. So how do you find the balance of telling your story both vividly and honestly? Today we have five tips and ways to approach your memoir storytelling that help you make progress and write—and finish—your book.
Before we get into today’s post, we wanted to ask—do you have a plan for actually finishing your memoir? If not, we know you aren’t making the progress you hoped for. That’s why we developed The Memoir Method Checklist. This free guide (and video training!) will take you through every single step you need from idea to published marketable book. Grab it now at https://pageandpodium.com/checklist
Readers care more about truth than facts
As we start to examine again the difference between truth and facts, keep in mind that the word “data” is technically plural. The singular is actually “datum” though you may never hear that and it’s even quickly falling out of the language through lack of use, mostly because a single datum is, in both science and life, kinda useless. By itself, it doesn’t tell us very much. It most certainly can’t tell us anything meaningfully true.
In the video, Amanda has a great breakdown of how facts like statistics can be broken up and dissected several different ways, through different lenses, and how this informs our understanding of things like the wage gap between men and women and people of different minorities. This is a great illustration of how cut-and-dry, black-and-white thinking obscures all the different ways things can be true.
I’m not suggesting that you invent details or fabricate events. When you can’t remember a detail with precision, ask yourself: How far can I zoom out while still being honest? Maybe you don’t remember the exact color of the chair you sat in during that pivotal conversation, but you do remember how uncomfortable you felt. You remember not knowing where to put your hands, whether to cross your legs, how your nerves made your posture stiff and uncertain. That emotional reality is something readers can connect to, even if their own chair wasn’t orange or blue or plaid.
This isn’t dishonesty. By anchoring your scene in the truth of your internal experience, you’re giving readers a more authentic point of connection. They may not share your circumstances, but they’ve felt nervous, exposed, unsure. That’s where resonance lives.
So when you hit a detail you simply cannot recall, remind yourself that readers rarely care about the missing fact and most won’t notice its absence. Instead of fixating on what you can’t remember, return to the umbrella of truth you do remember. What was the emotional temperature of that moment? What did it feel like in your body, in your mind? That’s the part that carries weight. That’s the part that stays with a reader long after the color of the chair has faded.
What readers want from a memoir is a sense of understanding and connection. You can make that happen through clear honesty and openness much more effectively than you can by spending months or years ensuring every last detail is present.
Google maps and other context research
This tip comes from Amanda’s and my experience as ghostwriters. Ghostwriting a memoir for someone else is a very different experience from writing your own, of course, but some of the tools we use as professionals translate beautifully to personal writing. Take to Google Maps.
A quick search on Google Maps, Google Images, or even a location’s website often reveals details we never would have noticed in person. And you’ve experienced this too: think about attending a wedding where you had a perfectly nice time, noticed a few decorations, and then later saw the photos and realized how much you missed in the moment. That’s exactly what we’re tapping into. The emotional truth is what stays with you, but the factual details often still exist somewhere. Indexed tools can help you refresh your memory just enough to write the scene with confidence.
Caveat: don’t let this turn into a rabbit hole. Writers can lose weeks or even months second‑guessing chapters and spiraling into unnecessary verification. If you enjoy looking through old photos, that’s fine, but don’t confuse that with productive memoir work.
Fact-Checking
Coming at the idea a different way, I’ll share some things I’ve learned from friends who’ve worked as fact-checkers, both in legal and journalistic fields and for popular nonfiction authors and memoirists. One of the essential features of the job of fact-checking is that you have to develop a sense of where to stop, because there is no actual bottom you can dig down to. Fact-checkers make human decisions about how far to investigate details. For example, one instance included an event where eight people were in a room talking about a document. After the meeting, the document was not needed. A writer described throwing away the document as they left the room—but was there a trash can in the room? Was it down the hall? Did it live in the bottom of someone’s bag for a month before it was thrown away? This might be the kind of thing a fact-checker would love to dig into and answer definitively, but it wouldn’t aid the client or the work itself. For another example, try figuring out which employee to ask for when calling a hospital because you want to know if the trees outside the maternity ward in 1987 were in fact Bradford Pears. An experienced fact-checker needs to understand that what matters is the document was never seen again and the woman sneezed continuously throughout her delivery. * You’ve got to stop somewhere.
Remember that no one can ever actually relate the whole factual exactness of even a single moment, even if they wanted to. What matters is the larger truth—what you’ve learned and feel compelled to share from an experience. Details can and do support the telling of experience, but they don’t affect the impact as much as you might think. And not nearly as much as your anxiety tells you they will.
*By the way, the details of those examples have been made vague or even swapped out for replacements to disguise the projects and because it was a fun way to further illustrate that the details don’t make the point.
Dialogue
Dialogue is the written recreation of spoken conversation—an attempt to capture the rhythm, tone, and emotional truth of what was said, even when the exact wording has long since faded. No reader of memoir who encounters dialogue is under the impression that the writer carried a mini‑recorder everywhere for thirty years. Readers understand that dialogue in memoir is reconstructed, shaped, and distilled. What matters is that it feels true to the moment, the relationship, and the emotional stakes.
Some memoirists choose not to include dialogue at all, opting instead for summarized conversations or reflective narration. That’s a valid stylistic choice, but it often comes with a trade‑off: the book may read as less immersive, less scene‑driven, and less like fiction. Finding your personal balance—how much dialogue you use, how closely you try to approximate remembered speech—depends entirely on the goals of your book.
The guiding principle is simple: aim for emotional accuracy, not verbatim transcription.
Brainstorm Facts
Our third tip is simple and practical, something you can reliably turn to whenever you’re facing a challenging scene: brainstorm a list of the facts you do know. Writers often get stuck on a single detail they can’t remember that may not even be the right detail to include. Any scene offers dozens of possible details, yet we tend to latch onto the first one that pops up, even if it’s the least reliable.
To break that pattern, change your medium. Grab a physical piece of paper and draw two columns: Facts and Truths. Step away from the computer and fill each column with everything you can remember, concrete facts on one side, emotional truths on the other.
When you return to your draft, choose in strategic pairs. Where does a remembered fact align with a deeper truth? Where can a concrete detail act as a symbol, or amplify the emotional tone you’re trying to convey? You don’t need to recall every detail; you only need the ones that move the story forward.
No one remembers everything. But you absolutely remember enough to write a vivid, honest scene—and that’s all memoir ever asks of you.
Free Write
When you hit the messy middle of your memoir, that long middle section that spans roughly 25% to 75% of the book, it’s common to feel bogged down, bored, or a little mechanical. At this stage, details can become more distracting than helpful, not because you don’t know them, but because you’re simply tired.
So instead of brainstorming, free write. Truly free write. This can feel surprisingly difficult in the middle of a meaningful book project, because shifting into a mode where you’re writing without expectation—without worrying where the scene fits or whether it “belongs”—goes against every instinct you’ve built so far. But giving yourself permission to just dump the scene out, as though you were telling it to a friend, often unlocks the details you’ve been straining to remember. Once you’re in flow, your memory tends to cooperate.
Free writing can happen in a Word document, a notebook, or a journal—whatever feels easiest. The key is to ignore context, structure, and readability. You’re not writing for the book; you’re clearing the cobwebs. You’re reconnecting with the part of you that knows these stories intimately, the part that remembers what matters. Once that channel opens back up, the details you need almost always rise to the surface.
If the physical act of writing is something that tires you, you can also consider not writing your free expression down at all, but doing a little free talking. When I’m stuck and also feeling a little eye strain, I take a little walk without my phone and talk out loud about what I need to write next. There’s no pressure on that talk because I’m not even recording it, but what I remember from my walk and talk is usually just right for
Does it really need to be a scene?
When you’ve tried every strategy and still can’t recall the details you need to write a scene, it’s time to ask a deceptively simple question: Does this actually need to be a scene? Writers often get attached to the idea that a particular moment must be rendered cinematically—with action, dialogue, and sensory detail—even when their memory can’t support that level of vividness. That attachment can create unnecessary frustration and blind you to other perfectly valid narrative choices.
Sometimes the best solution is to shift the moment out of scene mode and into exposition Not every event in a memoir needs to unfold beat‑by‑beat. Some moments simply need to be conveyed so the reader understands what happened before you move on to the material that truly carries the emotional or thematic weight. A few sentences or a short paragraph of summary can do that work beautifully.
And here’s the key: if you’ve told this story to other people—and almost every memoirist has—you already remember enough. You’re likely pressuring yourself to recall different details than the ones that actually matter. So even if it’s just a temporary choice, consider turning the would‑be scene into exposition or summary and letting another, more vivid moment carry the chapter’s dramatic load. Some details are simply gone, and that’s okay. Your job is to work with what remains, not chase what isn’t coming back.
PS. Searching the internet for writing, publishing, and book marketing advice can be exhausting to say the least! If you’re ready for hands on, one-on-one support for your memoir, check out The Memoir Method. We’d love to welcome you into this nine-month group program specially designed for women writing their first memoirs. And don’t forget, if you’d like to chat with Amanda about the program (or any other services we offer), you can book a free consult any time!
